No means no.
More than two months of takeover drama appears to have come to an end Thursday morning as Emulex Corp. rejected an upped $912 million takeover bid from Broadcom Corp., and the Irvine chipmaker said it’s walking away.
Emulex said early Thursday that its directors rejected Broadcom’s latest offer, which came late last month and topped its original $764 million offer from April.
Directors at Emulex reiterated their take that the offer “significantly undervalues Emulex’s long-term prospects, is inadequate, and is not in the best interests of Emulex and its stockholders.”
In a press release shortly after, Broadcom said it’s dropping its bid to buy Emulex.
“There are other value-creating alternatives that we will now turn our attention to,” Broadcom said in a statement.
Shares of Broadcom were up about 4% at close of trading on a market value of $11.6 billion.
Investors of Emulex, on the other hand, sent the company’s stock plunging, down 8% at end of trading with a market value of $740 million.
Emulex also gave a preview of its results for the three months through June and said it recently won contracts with two undisclosed computer makers for a new type of networking electronics that bridge faster data storage computers with everyday servers and desktops.
The company’s sluggish performance of late and its future prospects were a major plank in Broadcom’s argument for a takeover.
Emulex said it expects to report quarterly revenue of $78 million to $79 million, up from $73 million to $80 million projected in April.
The company said it expects earnings before charges near the high end of its prior guidance of $826,000 to $4.1 million.
At the heart of the takeover drama was a battle over the next generation of computer networks.
Up to now, Broadcom and Emulex have co-existed in the computer networking world and haven’t directly faced off with each other.
Broadcom makes chips for servers and routers that speed data on networks. (It also makes chips for consumer electronics, wireless phones and desktop computers.)
Emulex makes chips and circuit boards for specialized banks of computers that store and quickly serve up data to corporations, banks, governments and others.
Now the faster, special data networks of Emulex’s world are expected to converge with the everyday networks of Broadcom’s with a technology known as fibre channel over Ethernet.
Some server makers could be bypassing the fastest Ethernet networking cards with Broadcom chips in favor of fibre channel networking cards from Emulex, knowing that the two types of networks are expected to converge.
Last month, Broadcom raised the prospect of walking away from Emulex and said it has other options to tackle the emerging converged networks market, including developing technology itself or going after other acquisitions.
